Dr Nikolaus Wachsmann

Research interests* Teaching interests* Publications* Awards* Areas of research supervision* Contact details

Research interests

My research engages with different aspects of deviance and discipline in 20th century Germany, including crime, resistance, law, criminology and policing. I am particularly interested in the history of incarceration, focusing on prisons and camps in the Nazi period.

Teaching interests

At Birkbeck, I am teaching on the following courses:

BA Group 1: Europe since 1800

BA Group 2: The Birth of Modern Germany

BA Group 3: The Third Reich

MA Contemporary History and Politics: Empire, State and Nation

MA Option: The Nazi Capture of Power

MA Option: The Nazi State

MA Option: The Holocaust

Publications

BOOKS:

Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) xvii & 538 pp

Translated as:

Le Prigioni di Hitler. Il sistema carcerario del Terzo Reich (Milan: Mondadori, 2008), 610 pp.

Gefangen unter Hitler. Justizterror und Strafvollzug im NS-Staat (Munich: Siedler, 2006), 623pp.

Hitlers gevangenissen. De rechtsorde in Nazi-Duitsland (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2005), 492 pp

EDITED VOLUMES:

Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (London: Routledge, 2010), co-edited with Professor Jane Caplan.

ARTICLES:

‘The Dynamics of Destruction: the Development of the Concentration Camps, 1933-45’, in Caplan, Wachsmann (eds), Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 17-43

'The Policy of Exclusion: Repression in the Nazi State, 1933-1939', in J. Caplan (ed.), Short Oxford History of Germany: The Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 122-45

'Strafvollzug und Zwangsarbeit im Dritten Reich', in H. Kramer, K. Uhl, J.C. Wagner (eds), Zwangsarbeit im Nationalsozialismus und die Rolle der Justiz (Nordhausen, 2008), pp. 32-47

'Introduction', in M. Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators. Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (London: Pimlico, 2008), pp. vii-xxii

‘Looking into the abyss: historians and the Nazi concentration camps’, European History Quarterly 36 (2006), Nr. 2, pp.247-278.

Writing about the SS-State: Eugen Kogon, Buchenwald and the Nazi camps, in E. Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), pp. xi-xxiii

‘”Soldiers of the Home Front”: Jurists and Legal Terror during the Second World War', in N. Gregor (ed.), Nazism, War and Genocide (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2005)

'Prisons, Ghettos, Camps: Jews in captivity under the Third Reich', in Testaments of the Holocaust, Thomson Gale Electronic Publishing (2005)

‘Between Reform and Repression: Imprisonment in Weimar Germany', The Historical Journal 45 (2002), pp. 411-32

‘From Indefinite Confinement to Extermination. “Habitual Criminals” in the Third Reich', in R. Gellately, N. Stoltzfus (eds.), Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 165-91

'After Goldhagen. Recent Work on the Genesis of Nazi Genocide', Journal of Contemporary History 34 (1999), pp. 477-87

'"Die soziale Prognose wird damit sehr trübe": Theodor Viernstein und die Kriminalbiologische Sammelstelle in Bayern', in M. Farin (ed.), Polizeireport München (Munich, 1999), co-authored with W. Burgmair and M. M. Weber

‘”Annihilation through Labor”: The Killing of State Prisoners in the Third Reich', The Journal of Modern History 71 (1999), pp. 624-59

‘Marching under the Swastika? Ernst Jünger and National Socialism in the Weimar Republic', Journal of Contemporary History 33 (1998), pp. 573-89

Awards

2009 British Academy Research Development Award

2006 AHRC Research Grant on the history of the early Nazi camps

2005 Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award (joint winner)

2004 Royal Historical Society Gladstone History Book Prize

2001 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History (joint winner)

2001 Guggenheim Foundation Research Grant

Areas of research supervision

I currently supervise 5 PhD students and welcome any proposals for research projects in modern German history (mainly first half of the 20th century), as well as on crime, punishment and imprisonment in the modern world more generally.

Contact details

Email: n.wachsmann@bbk.ac.uk

Tel: 020 7631 6568

Room: 660 Malet Street